What's an ExaNIC?

The ExaNIC range from Exablaze features world-leading latency performance, precision timing, a simple and flexible programming interface, and true hardware extensibility through FPGA based reconfiguration.

Once the drivers are installed, ExaNICs present as normal network cards under Linux and many of the features are available through standard Linux APIs, however there are also additional tools and libraries that unlock the full performance and feature set.

An exanic-config utility provides an overview of device configuration and status at a glance.

An exanic-capture utility is provided for packet capture. With appropriate configuration, ExaNICs can provide lossless line rate capture at 10G. Accurate hardware timestamps are provided for each packet, to 6.2ns resolution for most ExaNICs and to 0.25ns resolution on the ExaNIC HPT (High Precision Timing) variant.

For low latency applications, Linux sockets applications can be accelerated with the exasock wrapper that hooks sockets calls and sends data directly to the card, bypassing the kernel. No recompilation is necessary. Alternatively, developers can access the card directly, including sending and receiving packets, through the libexanic API. Exasock also provides an extensions API that allows a hybrid model, where sockets are used for the majority of TCP functions but bypassed on the critical path.

Hardware traffic filtering and steering features are available to reduce host application load.

Advanced users with specific network processing needs can also program the onboard FPGA to develop custom network functions in hardware. (The Firmware Development Kit is licensed separately.)